“Oiseaux” is perfectly regular and involves no exceptions to the baseline rules of French pronunciation, though, AFAIK; if it were pronounced any way other than it is, it would warrant a question...
And anyway we all know that there's only one way to write "Mister oiseau" in french and it's "Mr Oizo" (french electro btw):
I guess you could argue that there is an "aah" after the "oo", so the "a" in "-eaux" counts, but the "aah" is not pronounced where the "a" is written in the word.
Btw, I can't make a good French accent on a keyboard but: oo-aah-zoh.
Each letter combination is a colour. You only have access to some colours, but not all.
Some colours (letter combinations) look good together, and others don’t. When they don’t, you try to see the “colour” as another one until it makes sense (looking for context). Kind of like “what colour is dress”.
To speak to your British English example, you also know that some places (i.e. regional dialects) don’t use a standard colour and only use one they “whipped up” at home.
If you have access to multiple palletes (i.e you are multilingual), you realize some colours might be similar but not always the same. If there are similar colours, they each have a different “shade”. Paint consistency might also vary.
This is also how you can learn to talk in accents. Instead of using native sounds to pronounce a word in one language, you “dip” into a “sound palette” of another language to try to get as close as you can to the original word.
1 - Don't get me started with German grammar, especially the way prepositions conjugate with the (arbitrary) gender of the noun, and the various types of prepositions reuse the same conjugations. It's clearly a language designed to detect foreign speakers and berate them.
2 - Why is electron charge negative? How many unnecessary minus signs has this poor choice caused?
3 - Or music notation vs piano keys - mapping keys to notes is needlessly complex, requiring both a flip and a rotation. (By far the best notation would be vertical, with frequency still increasing to the right in both forms - which takes into account right-hand dominance prevalence and musical taste that wants repetitive bass.) How many kids were and are turned off by this notational horror, and don't get into music at all simply because their (quite correct) aesthetics are immediately violated by arcane music notation?
Definitions don't require explanations because they already have the immense power of consensus. Consensus is rare and precious and if you try to optimize the object, you must fight the entire consensus battle again, and for only marginal gains. Some weirdos (I use this term warmly) get pretty far though, like with tau and 2*pi.
While I am not a experienced musician, there seems to be a clear trade-off here. The mapping to any single instrument's interface isn't immediately obvious, but it allows me to read music written for piano and play some of it on my cello without having to know how piano keys are arranged. Compatibility between music notation across instruments is IMO a really cool feature.
Edit: >Don't get me started with German grammar, especially the way prepositions conjugate with the (arbitrary) gender of the noun, and the various types of prepositions reuse the same conjugations. It's clearly a language designed to detect foreign speakers and berate them.
Even as a native German speaker, I agree that German grammar is ridiculous. At least Germany reformed their spelling though and made it more consistent. It was quite controversial, but allowed me to get decent spelling grades back in school. Till the reform, I always lost points in exams that weren't even about spelling because I made so many mistakes.
… true… and then it’s messed with by, for example Bb trumpets - a concept I didn’t learn about until adulthood.
raises hand
Just FYI, pretty much all Indo-European languages have gender-based noun declension. This is not special to German, it’s English that’s one of the few special ones that have lost it, no other European Indo-European language had.
German, if anything, has rather simple scheme, where only the preposition declenses. Compare it with eg. Polish, which has 7 cases (compared to 4 in German), and declension is done on the suffix of the noun itself, which is itself pretty irregular, partly due to the fact that even within a gender, different noun types declense differently, eg. there are masculine personal, masculine animate and masculine inanimate nouns, and these three can be seen as subgenders. I simply don’t have an idea how any non-native speaker can have any hope to learn all of this other than through many years of practice.
When I was a child trying to learn music reading for piano, it was incredibly arcane and difficult, but it was learnable with a lot of practice. The equivalent of "phonics" lasts well into college for composers and conductors, though, who have a lot more to learn to build a mental model of a score.
I should also add that young pianists and organists have the hardest job here - most instruments otherwise require you to read at most 4 notes at a time from one "staff" (a staff is like a line of text). Even professionals on other instruments can have trouble reading piano music, which can involve 10 or more simultaneous notes spread across 2 staves (or 3 for organ music).
I think "designed by power users for power users" nails it. Another way of putting it, is that there's a symbiosis between writers and players, if both are skilled in the same notation system, whatever it is. If you can read, you can find work. If you can write in standard notation, you can find people to play it. This creates a huge dis-incentive to explore new notations, except as an academic exercise.
Because the person who decided the sign didn't have a way of knowing a priori whether the stuff that was moving from rod to fur and from rod to silk was numerically a particular kind of charge carrier flowing in a particular kind of direction. At the point you're rubbing a piece of silk on a glass rod, you know some transfer is happening to make the silk attract the fur, but you don't know whether you're rubbing something off of the rod or onto the rod.
Of course Gradually tastes changed and Church music became polyphonic - adding a second (and third, fourth, fifth, etc) vocal line was a natural adaptation. Instrumentalists took it up outside of the Church, and the rest is history. We standardized on this notation because, even though it was originally for the human voice, it is convenient and good enough that everyone could make use of it.
Finally, I'll note that 20th century composers experimented endlessly with alternate notations, some more seriously than others: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/5-12-examples-of...
The articles (definite, indefinite) , prepositions and phrasal verbs are pure hell to learn.
And I don't undesirable what you mean by music notation and piano. The system is quite easy.
Yes, they will get it wrong a lot, too. But that is fine so long as you aren't ridiculing them for being wrong. Acknowledge the difference and move on.
For the specific examples you are using, the general idea is that we have a set of phonetics that can be applied to letters and letter pairings. Which one is used is often defined by the rest of the word.
Do kids ask questions? Absolutely. Get used to saying, "I don't know." Or "its complicated with and based on the history of the word." Even better if you can have time to go into the history some and explore it. Because that can be what gets kids interested. Exploring.
(And this is no different than many other things. Why do you have the name that you have? Why is it spelled as it is? In languages with genders, why are some words male and some female? There is no solid logical reason for any of those. Path dependence is a thing.)
Yeah, don't get me started on cricket :P
Pronunciation rules are taught along with the words that follow them and then you learn the many exceptions. Just in Chemistry class you learn the ideal gas law and then you learn the deviations.
Phonics is a strategy to deal with unfamiliar words and it works pretty well as a starting point.
English spelling and pronunciation has to be memorized, fortunately young kids have an enormous capacity for memorization so it works ok.
Many school programs use the opposite strategy now. They don't teach phonics and they don't teach spelling. "Inventive spelling" where kids just make up spelling and they aren't corrected is used for the first two years. At the start of the third year they are suddenly judged on spelling. But they just spent two years practicing incorrect spelling!
English is phonetic; but it's also bimodal.
To be fair, we did not use "phonics" as a formal procedure, but simply a loose term for taking advantage of the limited clues built into the written language.
And it doesn't help if you can pronounce a word but don't know what it means. My kids learned by rote words such as "allegiance," "republic," and "god," without anybody explaining the meaning of those words to them.
1. borough (-oh) 2. through (-oo) 3. rough (-uff) 4. cough (-awf) 5. thought (-aw-) 6. plough (-ow)
And in some accents it can be a schwa (uh). I associate this with Britain and some northeast American regions. There are probably other sounds too.
As a kid, I was just told that these are 6 sounds that it can make. I was given them in that order (ostensibly in order of most common use), told to memorize them, and when encountering it in a word, try them until one seems correct. For some other phonics I had some mnemonics. For "oo" I remembered: "Don't eat food that you took from the floor."
Check out the book, Finnigan's Wake, by James Joyce for an example.
And how do you explain "Loughborough"? Why not "Lowborrow", as in "low" and "borrow"?
Don't kids ask those things when you teach them to read with phonics?
I got similar questions for the French, btw. "Oiseaux"? Really, French?